As a startup founder, it can be difficult to nail the way you look after the People side of your business — especially at the beginning, when you’re only setting the foundations to then go and grow your team.

What makes it even harder is that HR is only one of the many areas of the business founders have to focus on while scaling their business. James Gill, CEO of GoSquared, knows this dilemma very well:

“If one thing is gonna keep me up at night, it's worrying about the team. Is that person happy? Are they being paid the right amount? Am I giving them enough direction? It's not like all a founder has to do is worry about their team — you've got the finances, the growth, the business direction to look after.”

In 2015, GoSquared signed up for CharlieHR, and things started to fall into place:

James found in Charlie a way to start building People processes into the business. He stopped being the bottleneck for all things HR — Charlie became that central place where the team could independently find the answers to all their People questions.

Refocus your time on what really matters

Small business founders have a lot on their plate, and often not enough time to focus on what they most care about. “I'm extremely conscious of my own time. I know that I want to try and spend it helping the team grow and do their jobs as well as they possibly can.”

Charlie has helped James implement all the HR processes GoSquared needed to succeed — so he could spend more time and mental energy on the foundational aspects of the business:

Let’s run through some of Charlie’s features and see how they helped James claim back his precious time.

Automate your team’s time off — “Goodbye, spreadsheets 👋”

“Tracking time off was probably the first pain point that we felt Charlie could solve for us,” James points out.

Back then, GoSquared used emails and spreadsheets to keep track of who was on holiday or off sick: “As the team grew, that became unsustainable — it was too error prone as a process, and the amount of back and forth was draining.”

Now, every team member at GoSquared can request time off directly in Charlie. James can see any potential clashes and approve time off with one click, which saves him huge amounts of time. Having the whole company’s time off data in Charlie gives James complete visibility on the team’s whereabouts:

Most importantly, it’s now very easy for James to find out if someone in the team is overdue some holiday: “I've got a number to go by in Charlie — it's always there and I know I can trust it. I feel that enables me to look after the team in a way that’s much more tangible.”

A safe place to store your employee data — and make it easy to find

Switching from Dropbox to Charlie, James was able to collect and store all employee data in one place, making it a much more accessible and safe process.

With all employee information stored in Charlie, the team at GoSquared can be safe in the knowledge they are handling it the right way: “With GDPR, everyone cares a lot more about privacy, and rightly so,” James explains. “Explaining that we're using Charlie can be enough to reassure anyone who has concerns.”

A smooth onboarding process — to help every new hire hit the ground running

There are a lot of admin tasks involved in onboarding a new employee: “There’s all this administrative back and forth… while all you’d want to focus on is getting the new team member excited about starting and helping them get into their role,” James says.

Before switching to Charlie, James used to have an onboarding checklist in Trello: “It was taxing enough to remember to get that checklist out every time, and find out where it was, and make sure it was all up to date.”

Having Charlie to help with onboarding is allowing James to let go of some of the tasks he’s always been responsible for — and to focus on other aspects of growing the team:

“Charlie’s onboarding features make it so much easier to delegate. We are starting to change this assumption that the founders will onboard every single new team member. Thanks to Charlie, we now feel confident we can hand that off to other people — which is great progress.”

Why join Charlie? “It’s more about — why would you not?”

“Everytime I recommend CharlieHR to a fellow startup founder,” James says, “I insist that it’s never too soon. Even if it's just for yourself, your one-person company — if you have any intention of hiring, then it's probably a good idea to have Charlie.”

When small companies start to worry about HR, it’s often already too late. They’re triggered by an unexpected People issue. Or simply they start hiring and they realise they don’t have appropriate HR processes to cope with more people joining the business.

“Also, why would you not?” James says.